jdlev has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

It's been a while since I programmed in perl, so please try to be fairly elementary in your explanations :)

I've been trying to extra data from the key statistics page of yahoo. Basically, I'm looking to create a custom stock screener. In order to do that, I've got to pull information from finance.yahoo.com. The key statistics has a lot of info in it I'm interested in that doesn't appear in normal screeners.

I've tried both HTML::TableExtract & HTML::TableExtractor to no avail. Looking at their setup is like trying to read french.

I didn't because the fairly trivial task of setting undefined cells to a space becomes the dominant code in the sample. I'd hoped that the line would be pretty much ignored, but in retrospect that was pretty silly really.

Before anyone starts talking about doing HTML scraping these days, it's always important to ask the question, "Is there a better way to do this?". The answer, direct from Yahoo, is yes, yes there is. Use web APIs, not HTML scraping (and YQL is your friend). This way, if Yahoo changes the syntax of their HTML (which can happen at a moment's notice), your tool will continue working.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other